


May the Matronyms be With You

by friendlyneighborhoodsecretary



Series: Found Family Bingo [3]
Category: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Adult Peter Parker, But especially May, F/M, Found Family Bingo, Gen, It's V Rambly and I'm Sorry, MJ loves her Found Family, Naming Babies is Hard, Parents-To-Be Spideychelle, Post-Spider-Man: Far From Home, Post-Spider-Man: Homecoming, Pregnancy, Spideychelle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:27:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23274727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendlyneighborhoodsecretary/pseuds/friendlyneighborhoodsecretary
Summary: Settling on a good, solid name for your kid is a lot harder than you'd think. Fortunately, the Parker family has some pretty good legacies to draw on.
Relationships: May Parker (Spider-Man) & Peter Parker, Michelle Jones & May Parker (Spider-Man), Michelle Jones/Peter Parker
Series: Found Family Bingo [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1644271
Comments: 13
Kudos: 96





	May the Matronyms be With You

**Author's Note:**

> This came out much more rambly than I anticipated, but the imagery made me happy, so I'm afraid y'all are stuck with it. Thank you for indulging me and my purple prose! <3  
> Prompt: Children

The mural, MJ decides, has taken over her life almost as much as the baby has.

It’s not necessarily a _bad_ thing. She doesn’t mind having a relatively mindless project to settle down with in the evenings like this when her articles are written, her deadlines are met, and Peter is usually still out flitting around the rooftops (not that she _always_ waits up, thank you very much, but…when she does, the distraction is nice). It’s just that she fully expected to be done with the stupid thing before she hit her third trimester, let alone by now, when the last few weeks of month number nine are trickling out like molasses from a spoon.

The rest of the nursery is done, from the pale, soothing sky blue that coats the walls—apart from where the mural fades in—to the arduous set-up of the IKEA crib and the weird futon/bed-thing that Pepper had gifted them along with the ominous warning that they’d need it come time for three a.m. feedings and colicky nights. But the mural…the mural is a stubborn piece of work that refuses to be completed. There are always a few more brushstrokes to add, a few details to perfect, a few new ideas to be worked in…a niggling sensation that it isn’t ready yet.

That perhaps _she_ isn’t ready yet. She supposes that’s fair. The nursery is done and the hospital and birthing plan selected, but precious little else is settled. Schedules still need to be juggled, childcare for the inevitable end of maternity leave nailed down, final decisions made on pediatricians…It’s a lot. And that’s without even touching the name quandary.

"Leia."

"No."

"Padme."

"No."

"Rey?"

" _No_ ," MJ lobs a wadded-up spare drop cloth across the nursery floor, catching a snickering Peter in the chest. "And if you pull one more Star Wars name out of your nerd brain at any point in the next three weeks—" She lifts the paintbrush she's been using to shade in a cluster of trees along the baseboards and jabs it his direction with considerable menace "—you're gonna regret it."

"C'mon, MJ,” Peter’s voice is muffled from the swollen bruise over his jaw, but he manages a good wheedling tone all the same. “She's comin’ on _May the 4th_! Y’can't just ignore that."

She’s a little surprised that he can talk at all. He had tumbled through their bedroom window two nights before in a tattered suit and half-delirious from more injuries than she could catalogue with a cursory glance. Now, he lies draped across the futon that MJ is already grateful for, drowsy and loose from the high-powered pain meds as he cradles a broken arm over a set of cracked ribs, but just awake enough to insist on staying close while MJ paints. It’d be adorable if the residual worry didn’t tempt her to throttle him every time she glances over at the collection of bruises and bumps she calls a husband.

"Babies are never born on their due dates; it’s a thing." MJ turns back to her work, leaning back on her hands for a moment for a better perspective of the scenes that wind around the bottom half of two of the nursery’s walls. A bright, stylized exterior view of the penthouse they’d settled into after Peter’s MIT graduation with a warm orange sunset glowing behind it and a subtle flash of red and blue on the horizon. The lakehouse, tucked deep into its cozy grove of pines and oaks with the latest of Morgan’s line of pet alpacas peeking from behind a trunk. May and Happy’s brownstone with the inviting little candles that May likes shining from the windows and the dependable black sedan idling at the sidewalk. It’s a jumble, a mixed-up collage of all the places that matter: the places the baby would come to know as home. "And I'm not ignoring it. I just have other plans."

"Oh, yeah?" Peter perks up from where his head has lolled against the arm of the futon, his hair squashed endearingly flat on that side and his eyes blearily bright. Neither of them have put too much time or attention into the question of baby names so far—they’re busy people even on their standard schedule, let alone on the one they fell into when OBGYN visits and Lamaze classes and car-seat shopping ventures had to be squeezed in—but it hasn’t escaped MJ that Peter tiptoes around the subject when it comes to serious suggestions rather than geeky jokes. When pressed, he says that he isn’t the one lugging around a Thanksgiving turkey at his middle. That he won't be the one straining it through any uncomfortable bodily orifices, so any final decisions are MJ’s. It’s sweet, thoughtful in the way that Peter always is. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t anxious about it. MJ is no fool—she’d recognize that brand of nobly-hidden Parker fretting anywhere after so many years spent shoulder-to-shoulder with it. She can’t blame him for it, though. No one with a middle name like Peter’s and the baggage that tags along with it would be able to take the weight of a name—of the _choice_ of a name—lightly. That much is obvious in the way he lists toward her at the very prospect of a decision, perilously close to tipping off the couch for something as small as a hint. "Like...?"

"May."

She says it slowly. Carefully, to make sure the single syllable is understood even through the haze of whatever superhuman drugs Tony funnels to their medicine cabinet these days. Once it’s out, she goes silent to let him process. The room is still outside of the soft whisper of her brush against the baseboards. Quiet above the distant hum of traffic and taxi horns.

She won’t fight him on it if he wants to go another direction, but May feels…right. It has for a long while now she realizes as she gives the candle painted into the window of May’s spot on the mural a little extra brightness with a few generous dabs of warm yellow light.

She listens to the girls at work moan and groan about their mothers-in-law and always has to bite her tongue, half because the concept of women being pitted against each other in a cliched intergenerational struggle is a few dozen shades of stupid and half because _her_ mother-in-law has more strength and intelligence and generosity in her little finger than half of New York combined.

May gives and gives and _gives_ day-in and day-out. MJ’s seen it happening ever since she first trailed into the Parker apartment on Peter and Ned’s heels and promptly found herself as thoroughly mothered as the other two despite being a stranger. A surly stranger, to boot. No matter how prickly she was or how blunt or how awkward about adjusting to the concept of a parental figure who was actually _present_ , May’s relentless kindness never faltered. Not then and not in any of the years they’ve weathered since then, even when MJ’s own family remained distant and disjointed in the aftermath of the Blip.

They circle on opposite sides of Peter’s orbit for most of those years, she and May—bit players in each other’s lives connected solely by the starring role Peter played in each of theirs. She hears plenty of May-did-this and May-did-that from Peter, she sees her in the fleeting moments at the beginnings and ends of dates, they chat sometimes during the breaks in the study afternoons spent in the Parker living room—it’s not much when totaled up, although the occurrences do increase as the years pass and Peter slowly shifts further into MJ’s orbit than May’s. But MJ sees enough of May Parker in the brief eclipses that bring them together to settle on at least one solid conclusion: May Parker is a force of nature.

The thought doesn’t crystallize until a particularly bad night during the winter break of her and Peter’s junior year of college. Four a.m. on Christmas Eve came with Peter bleeding out in an understaffed ER, and MJ crouching on the edge of a plastic chair with his mask balled up in her fists and his blood drying the hands she’d pressed to his wounds on the way there. May blew in like hell in house-slippers, decked out in her pjs with a long, loose braid that swung in her wake as she strode into the bay and took charge with little more than a flash of her ID from the hospital she usually staffed and a glare made of pure murder at the nurse who suggested she sit out the crisis. The rest of the night passed in what felt like a blink, the process of getting the bleeding stopped, finding an appropriate dosage for Peter’s painkillers, and managing his eventual transfer into the care of the Stark medical team once they arrived all blurring together in an efficient haze with May at the helm. MJ barely noticed any time had passed until May was shepherding her to the bathroom to help her scrub the crusted blood from beneath her nails, her voice as gentle and soothing as it had been commanding a few moments earlier.

It struck Michelle in that moment that May was who she wanted to be when she grew up.

She wasn’t, of course, because May was May and Michelle was Michelle and life asked very different things of them both, but…Michelle still doesn’t think it was a bad bar to aim for. And even though she knows her daughter will be different from the both of them, will face different hurdles and fight different foes and hopefully— _hopefully_ —will not have inherited enough of her father to have to walk on the ceiling while doing it, she thinks giving her a little piece of that legacy to carry with her wouldn’t exactly be a bad thing. There’s a certain weight to it, certainly—but Michelle can’t help thinking that that can offer just as much stability as it can stress. Like the comfort of a weighted blanket on a cold night or a steady arm over your shoulders on a slippery path.

But the name doesn’t belong to her alone, no matter how much Peter insists that it does. So she waits.

Peter goes painfully still, his gaze slowly lifting to settle on Michelle as his face shifts through half a dozen emotions in the space of split second. She pauses, too, resting her paintbrush delicately on the rim of the tray as she watches Peter. His mouth opens and closes a few times, as if the breath has been knocked out of him.

"May," he finally repeats, rolling it across his tongue as if it wasn't the same word he's spoken a million times before. "Not for "may the Force be with you," I guess?"

"Nah. It's just, you know how I feel about matronyms—"

A wobbly grin flickers across Peter’s face in spite of the moment's gravitas as they both remember the three-way lecture May, Pepper, and MJ had fallen into at a family dinner the week before. None of them had actually _disagreed_ about the inequality of feminine vs. masculine name legacies, but any conversation in which all three of them managed to get fired up at once rose in volume by default. That conversation hadn’t exactly steered her towards this one…but it certainly hadn’t hurt, either.

"—and I think we've got a good opportunity to buck the trend here." She says it casually, as if she wasn’t measuring every word and gauging every move made from across the room. As if it didn’t mean as much to her as it did to give something to the woman who gave her everything. "May's a good name."

"Great name," Peter breathed, his eyes igniting with a firework burst of emotion that Michelle suspects is at least partially amplified by his drugged-up state…but not totally. His voice comes out soft and grateful and almost reverent despite the muffled tone. “Is that…I mean, are you sure? That’s really what you want?”

Michelle raises a brow at him, slow and deliberate in just the way that still makes Peter’s ears flush red at the tips even in his current condition.

“Have you ever known me to be cagey about what I want, Parker?”

He chuckles at that, trailing off into a cough when the effort is too much for his pummeled ribs, but it’s enough to make MJ grin, too. The relief of the decision washes through her like a wave. She sets down her paintbrush and squints at her handiwork again.

“Any thoughts on middle names?”

She expects a pause of some sort, at least. Perhaps a soft snore, given the way any long periods of serious thought have sent him drifting off to drug-fueled dreamland today. Maybe even another smattering of names drawn from Star Wars just for the sake of getting another rise out of her before Peter offers up any real suggestions, but he doesn’t even hesitate.

"Michelle," Peter fires off without a thought. As if he doesn’t even need to think on that. "S’my favorite name. And if we're going with matronyms, it’s only fair. She gets a name from her grandma—sort of, anyway—and a name from her mom." Peter’s throat bobs in a hard swallow and he smiles, soft and sweet and a little awed. Almost as awed as MJ is that this is their life now. That the banged-up nerd on the futon hybrid is hers, goofy smile and floppy hair and beautiful, _beautiful_ heart and all. "With names like those, she's got all she'll ever need."

"May Michelle Parker." MJ says it quietly, letting it hang in the air. Testing it for...for everything. For how it fell in the cozy space it would be spoken the most, for how the words clicked when strung together, for the way her stomach swooped at the taste of it, for the giddy little grin Peter flashed her when so many of the names he loved were woven together into a new one that already felt too real to ignore. Too right to ignore.

Her mouth had gone a little dry, her head a little light, almost the way they had when they’d first glimpsed the results of the pregnancy test a few months earlier. That moment had struck a balance somewhere between hazy and diamond-clear, in the same fashion as all the memories—good or bad—that were burned into the permanence of her memory had. This moment had, too.

"It's...it's good," Peter pipes up as he rolls unsteadily off his perch and scoots gingerly across the floor to lean on MJ’s shoulder. He props his chin in the crook of her neck and sighs, long and pleased and content. “ _Really_ good.”

"'Course it is." MJ finally sets her paintbrush aside for the night. There’s a finality about it that doesn’t bother her so much now. Maybe she still isn’t totally ready—she might never be if she keeps dwelling on all the little details that separate her from perfection. But the mural is ready. The _family_ is, for all its patchwork seams and strange legacies. And if she’s got that behind her, MJ supposes she can fake the rest. "It was my idea. Mostly."

Peter chortles, hoarse and drowsy and pleasant against her neck. "Mostly."

"Matronyms. They solve everything."

"You solve everything," Peter murmurs, ignoring the unruly curls that brush his face as MJ turns to begin gathering up the tarps and dropcloths. She can feel him smiling against the sensitive skin at the base of her throat, and she can’t help smiling too as she lifts a hand to pat the (uninjured) side of his face.

"That, too."

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all for reading, lovelies!!! Comments always send me over the moon, so those are always welcome! Or you're also welcome to find me on Tumblr under the same name!


End file.
